Jody Clarke-Midura

Utah State University | USU · Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences

In the United States, school curricula are often created and taught with distinct boundaries between disciplines. This division between curricular areas may serve as a hindrance to students’ long-term learning and their ability to generalize. In contrast, cross-curricular pedagogy provides a way for students to think beyond the classroom walls and...

Research involving digital games and language learning is rapidly growing. One advantage of using digital games to support language learning is the ability to collect data on students learning in real time. In this study, we use educational data mining methods to explore the relationship between in-game data and elementary students' Chinese languag...

Research involving digital games and language learning is rapidly growing. One advantage of using digital games to support language learning is the ability to collect data on students learning in real time. In this study, we use educational data mining methods to explore the relationship between in-game data and elementary students’ Chinese languag...

This chapter summarizes a multiyear investigation of task design and instructional practices for teaching coding with tangible screen-free coding toys in kindergarten classrooms (ages 5 and 6 years in the United States). Through multiple cycles of design-based research in classrooms, we iteratively designed instructional tasks, operationalized earl...

Background and Context Despite over 30 years of research on broadening participation, women are still underrepresented in Computer Science (CS) education. While enrolment in CS majors has increased, women earn only 18% of the CS baccalaureate degrees in the US. Objective Most research focuses on why women leave CS. This study explores factors (i.e...

Purpose Much remains unknown about how young children orient to computational objects and how we as learning scientists can orient to young children as computational thinkers. While some research exists on how children learn programming, very little has been written about how they learn the technical skills needed to operate technologies or to fix...

Recent studies have found that Chinese dual language immersion learners tend to lag behind their peers studying other languages in terms of literacy skills. Yet, teachers cannot simply prioritize literacy skills at the detriment of oral communicative skills. The present study explores how the integration of a digital game into the dual language imm...

Computational thinking (CT) is receiving growing attention in educational contexts, where robot coding toys are becoming a widely available means of teaching and learning early computing. As the field of child-computer interaction continues to define what it means for young children to think computationally, much is unknown about the affective dime...

We developed a near-peer mentoring model for high school youth to mentor middle school youth on how to program using MIT App Inventor. The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) the effectiveness of the near-peer mentoring model for the mentees and (b) how the mentees’ vicarious experience with the near-peer mentors led to changes in their se...

Programming activities have the potential to provide a rich context for exploring measurement units in early elementary mathematics. This study examines how a small group of young children (ages 5–6) express their emergent conception of a dynamic linear unit and the measurement concepts they found challenging. Video of an introductory programming l...

ABSRACT The purpose of this study was to explore how kindergarten students (aged 5–6 years) engaged with mathematics as they learned programming with robot coding toys. We video-recorded 16 teaching sessions of kindergarten students’ (N = 36) mathematical and programming activities. Students worked in small groups (4–5 students) with robot coding t...

There is a growing perception that computational thinking can be developed in unplugged environments. A recent trend among these unplugged approaches is the use of tabletop games. While there are many commercial tabletop games on the market that are promoted as teaching computer science and/or computational skills, little is known about how these g...

The importance of engaging students in disciplinary practices of science is widely acknowledged and well researched. What is less understood is how to assess students’ development of these practices. In particular, there is a need for understanding how formative assessment and feedback practices can be integrated into classroom instruction in ways...

Background and Context: There is a need for early childhood assessments of computational thinking (CT). However, there is not consensus on a guiding framework, definition, or set of proxies in which to measure CT. We are addressing this problem by using Evidence Centered Design (ECD) to develop an assessment of kindergarten-aged children’s CT. Obje...

This research explores reference frames and reference frame shifts among young children (ages 5 and 6) as they are learning to program with a commercial coding toy. To date, little is known about reference frames used by young children in toy-based coding. Video recordings of 16 children engaging in two programming tasks were collected. Results fro...

In response to the need to broaden participation in computer science, we designed a summer camp to teach middle-school-aged youth to code apps with MIT App Inventor. For the past four summers, we have observed significant gains in youth's interest and self-efficacy in computer science, after attending our camps. The majority of these youth, however...

This systematic review presents a definition for digital games within the second/foreign language (L2) learning research field. This definition is used to identify games used in research in the last five years (2012-2017). Forty-nine studies were identified and then summarized by type of research, game genre employed, age, and size of sample popula...

This emerging technology report describes computational toys as tools for learning and building computational thinking (CT) skills in young children. We present both a framework to categorize computational toys as well as a separate framework to evaluate the toys’ effectiveness for teaching CT skills. We then apply our frameworks to thirty computat...

In this study, we present an educational board game designed to promote both mathematics and Chinese language learning. We use text‐mining techniques to analyze dialog by 40 students, in six groups playing a board game in a dual language immersion context. Our findings provide evidence to support past claims and arguments that play and specifically...

Our work is situated in research on Computer Science (CS) learning in informal learning environments and literature on the factors that influence girls to enter CS. In this article, we outline design choices around the creation of a summer programming camp for middle school youth. In addition, we describe a near-peer mentoring model we used that wa...

Stereotypes people hold about computer scientists contribute to underrepresentation in computer science. Perceptions of computer scientists have historically been linked to males and a “nerd” culture, which can lead to lack of interest, particularly for girls. This article presents two studies conducted with two groups of middle schoolers: those wh...

Note-taking is important for academic success and has been thoroughly studied in traditional classroom contexts. Recent advancements of technology have led to more students taking notes on computers, and in different situations than are common in traditional instructional contexts. However, research on computer-based note-taking is still an emergin...

Science education frameworks in the United States have moved strongly in recent years to incorporate more dimensions of learning, including measuring student use of scientific practices employed during scientific inquiry. For instance, the Next Generation Science Standards and related multidimensional frameworks adopted or adapted recently by more...

Parental support is a predictor of children's career interest and aspirations. However, mother and father support affects youth career choices differently. To understand how perceived mothers' and fathers' support affect career interest in computer science (CS), we developed two path models using both mother and father support gains to predict yout...

Background This research builds on a previous study that looked at the effectiveness of a simulation-based module for teaching students about the process of evolution by natural selection. While the previous study showed that the module was successful in teaching how natural selection works, the research uncovered some weaknesses in the design. In...

In response to the national demand to increase participation in CS, we argue that youth's interest in computer science (CS) can be sparked by providing them with role models who are relatable and who resonate with their identities. To that end, we developed a mentoring model in which we train high schoolers to be near-peer mentors for middle school...

Over the past decade, immersive virtual environments have been increasingly used to facilitate students’ learning of complex scientific topics. The non-linearity and open-endedness of these environments create learning opportunities for students, but can also impose challenges in terms of extraneous cognitive load and greater requirements for self-...

Background Simulations can be an active and engaging way for students to learn about natural selection, and many have been developed, including both physical and virtual simulations. In this study we assessed the student experience of, and learning from, two natural selection simulations, one physical and one virtual, in a large enrollment introduc...

The Radix Endeavor is an inquiry-based educational game designed to encourage exploration and experimentation. Its design deeply integrates STEM practices as core game mechanics, enabling students to learn by doing in authentic contexts that are distributed across people, places, and time. Radix is a large-scale game that is not primarily designed...

In order to affect career decisions, it is important to reach youth at early ages. While some have focused on using mentors in order to successfully teach mentees, few have focused on the benefits to the mentors themselves. To our knowledge, no other research has been conducted on the effect that serving as a near-peer mentor has on increasing t...

Recent interest in online assessment of scientific inquiry has led to several new online systems that attempt to assess these skills, but producing models that detect when students are successfully practising these skills can be challenging. In this paper, we study models that assess student inquiry in an immersive virtual environment, where a stud...

Games can be a powerful tool for learning not only content knowledge but also skills and ways of thinking. In a classroom, the instructional design that goes into the implementation of a learning game is as important as the game itself. The Radix Endeavor is a multiplayer online game for inquiry-based STEM learning in which players explore mathemat...

Games can be a powerful tool for learning not only content knowledge but also skills and ways of thinking. In a classroom, the instructional design that goes into the implementation of a learning game is as important as the game itself. The Radix Endeavor is a multiplayer online game for inquiry-based STEM learning in which players explore mathemat...

In this paper, we briefly present a design framework, XCD, that we developed through the design of The Radix Endeavor, a multiplayer online game for STEM learning. The framework provides a method for ensuring that the learning objectives, game mechanics, and data collected are closely aligned throughout the design process. We present this method he...

Inquiry skills are an important part of science education standards. There has been particular interest in verifying that these skills can transfer across domains and instructional contexts [4,15,16]. In this paper, we study transfer of inquiry skills, and the effects of prior practice of inquiry skills, using data from over 2000 middle school stud...

Background/Question/Methods The experimental process for testing hypotheses is the backbone of all fields of science, but is something many students struggle with. All the new science standards and frameworks (NGSS, Vision and Change, etc.) strongly encourage active classrooms that help students understand and learn to do good experiments. Yet in...

Educational games offer an opportunity to engage and inspire students to take interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical STEM subjects. Unobtrusive learning assessment techniques coupled with machine learning algorithms can be utilized to record students' in-game actions and formulate a model of the students' knowledge without i...

Determining the effectiveness of any educational technology depends upon teachers’ and learners’ perception of the functional utility of that tool for teaching, learning, and assessment. The VPA project at Harvard University is developing and studying the feasibility of using immersive technology to develop performance assessments of middle school...

Causal reasoning is difficult for middle school students to grasp. In this research, we wanted to test the possibility of using machine learning for modeling students’ causal reasoning in a virtual environment designed to assess this skill. Our findings suggest it is possible to use machine learning to emulate student pathways that are able to pred...

In recent years, models of student inquiry skill have been developed for relatively tightly-scaffolded science simulations. However, there is an increased interest in researching how video games and virtual environments can be used for both learning and assessment of science inquiry skills and practices. Such environments allow students to explore...

The Virtual Performance Assessment Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (vpa.gse.harvard.edu) is studying the feasibility of using virtual performance-based assessments for measuring science inquiry skills that are situated in an authentic science problem. In these assessments, students take on the role of a scientist and have to exp...

The rise of digital game and simulation-based learning applications has led to new approaches in educational measurement that take account of patterns in time, high resolution paths of action, and clusters of virtual performance artifacts. The new approaches, which depart from traditional statistical analyses, include data mining, machine learning,...

Immersive and 3D virtual environments have the potential to offer more authentic science inquiry learning that allows for metacognitive and self-regulated learning strategies. While metacognition and self-regulated learning are important for science inquiry learning, little research exists on linking these skills with students' experience in a 3D i...

Continuing advances in information technology enable innovative ways for using performance-based assessments to measure science inquiry learning (Pellegrino, et al., 2001). Scientific inquiry is an active process comprised of four primary components: theorizing, questioning and hypothesizing, investigating, analyzing and synthesizing (White & Frede...

Current assessment approaches are inadequate for determining how well our students are developing sophisticated inquiry skills in science – a key 21st century capability for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. Research has documented that sophisticated, higher-order thinking skills related to complex cognition, inquiry...

The effectiveness of any educational technology depends upon teachers‟ and learners‟ perception of the functional utility of that medium for teaching, learning, and assessment. The Virtual Performance Assessment project at Harvard University (http://vpa.gse.harvard.edu) is developing and studying the feasibility of using immersive technology to dev...

Validating interactions in immersive virtual environments (IVE) used in educational settings is critical for ensuring their effectiveness for learning. The effectiveness of any educational technology depends upon teachers’ and learners’ perception of the functional utility of that medium for teaching, learning, and assessment. The purpose of this c...

Science inquiry is a cognitive process that depends upon the active engagement of students and is something that students do and is minds-on. However, given its active nature, assessing science inquiry process skills remains a challenge for educators. In this chapter, we describe research being carried out to develop virtual performance assessments...

Simulations and immersive environments provide innovative ways to measure students' science reasoning and inquiry skills. These computer-based assessments allow for dynamic displays of science systems that expand how phenomena, information, and data can be represented; they also allow for interactivity that provides new ways for learners to demonst...

The effectiveness of any educational technology depends upon teachers’ and learners’ perception of the functional utility of that medium for teaching, learning, and assessment. The Virtual Performance Assessment project at Harvard University (http://vpa.gse.harvard.edu) is developing and studying the feasibility of using immersive technology to dev...

Substantial evidence supports the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning, and more recently, assessment. Developing assessment activities for virtual worlds is inherently complex due to the open-ended, exploratory nature of 3-D immersive environments. This study developed a framework for designing activities that produce evidence of students'...

This paper represents one outcome from the Invitational Research Symposium on Technology-Enabled and Universally Designed Assessments, which examined technology-enabled assessments (TEA) and universal design (UD) as they relate to students with disabilities (SWD). It was developed to stimulate research into TEAs designed to make tests appropriate f...

This chapter details the 8-year development of River City from the initial design through its current large-scale version. Throughout the project’s history, we employed a design-based research (DBR) approach to the iterative, formative development of the MUVE-based inquiry curriculum, with a current focus on resolving scalability issues inherent in...

Despite three decades of advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and a generation of research on cognition and new pedagogical strategies, the field of assessment has not progressed much beyond paper-and-pencil item-based tests. Research has shown these instruments are not valid measures of sophisticated intellectual performance...

Research Goals and Theoretical Framework. Numerous researchers have emphasized the role of metacognitive processes in inquiry learning (White & Frederiksen, 1998, 2005; Kuhn, Black, Keselman, & Kaplan, 2000; Kempler, 2006; Kuhn & Pease, 2008). As an example, White et al offer a framework for inquiry learning, the meta-knowledge framework, which con...

Contemporary views of science education regard scientific inquiry and the ability to reason scientifically as the essential core of science education (American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 1993; Chinn & Malhotra, 2002; NRC, 1996; Krajcik et al, 1998; Songer et al, 2003). According to White and colleagues, scientific inquiry is...

This study investigated novel pedagogies for helping teachers infuse inquiry into a standards-based science curriculum. Using a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) as a pedagogical vehicle, teams of middle-school students collaboratively solved problems around disease in a virtual town called River City. The students interacted with ‘avatars’ of...

Inquiry learning is an educational approach that involves a process of exploration, asking questions and making discoveries in the search for new understandings. Researchers however are divided about the value of the approach. In the symposium, it is argued that one of the reasons for this controversy is the way that inquiry learning is assessed. C...

One-size-fits-all educational innovations do not work because they ignore contextual factors that determine an intervention’s efficacy in a particular local situation. This paper presents a framework on how to design educational innovations for scalability through enhancing their adaptability for effective usage in a wide variety of settings. The R...

Data-gathering and problem identification are key components of scientific inquiry. However, few researchers have studied how students learn these skills because historically this required a time-consuming, complicated method of capturing the details of learners' data-gathering processes. Nor are classroom settings authentic contexts in which stude...

Researchers in the learning sciences have long recognized the potential of online spaces to support learning activities; however, the pervasiveness of social media construction typically associated with "Web 2.0" represents a new context for the research of learning and instruction. Wikis, for example, have popularized a social approach to construc...

Science as it is portrayed in the typical K-12 classroom bears little resemblance to science as practiced by scientists, relying heavily on presentational pedagogies. To counter this, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Research Council, and the National Science Teachers Association have all called for a stronger e...

Three complementary technological interfaces are now shaping how people learn, with multiple implications for K-12 education (Dede, 2002). The familiar “world-to-the-desktop” interface provides access to distributed knowledge and expertise across space and time through networked media. Sitting at their laptop or workstation, students can access dis...

This paper provides elements of a transformational conceptual framework for CSCL by focusing on how learning takes place when the answer is not known (this being the case for complex design problems in numerous domains encountered in lifelong learning ...

This paper describes how multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) can simulate immersive, collaborative learning environments intermediate in complexity between recipe-like lab exercises and real world inquiry situations. We offer the River City MUVE as a case study that illustrates how rich logfiles provide scholars and teachers with detailed data...

This article offers insights into how the design of innovations can enhance their "scalability": the ability to adapt an innovation to effective usage in a wide variety of contexts, including settings where major conditions for success are absent or attenuated. We are implementing the River City MUVE curriculum, a technology-based innovation design...

This National Science Foundation funded study is investigating novel pedagogies for helping teachers infuse inquiry into a standards-based science curriculum. Using a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) as a pedagogical vehicle, teams of middle school students are asked to collaboratively solve a simulated 19th century city's problems with illnes...

Many researchers are exploring the types of learning that occur in informal out-of-school technology use (such as videogame play), yet the content of these environments tends not to align to national standards for academic content. This paper presents research on how a multi-user virtual environment centered on content related to national standards...